Pocket Pixels: First and [so far] Only

Nintendo's first attempt at a 2D scrolling shooter

Nintendo's development team has been known for creating games that cover a wide range of genres. By 1989, they had their fair share of platformers, sports titles, puzzle games, and action/adventure outings. But up till that year, Nintendo had never created a shot 'em up type of game on a home system. I mean sure, the NES had games like Xevious, 1943, and Gradius, but such game were released by third party developers. Nintendo had yet to get their feet wet with 2D shooters. Actually, you might say that they still haven't, because by comparison to the other shooter game out there, they only dipped their pinky toe in vast sea of possibilities. This pinky-toe-in-the-sea appeared in 1990 in America in the form of Solar Striker on the Game Boy. Not only was it the first 2D scrolling shooter that Nintendo R&D1 developed, it would also be only one to date. I remember when my brother got for his GB back then. We didn't have any shooter games on our NES, except Contra, and it would be quite some years down the road before I'd play Gradius. So Solar Striker was the first scrolling space shooter that I had ever laid my eyes on. I watch in awe as my brother bravely fought through the seemly impossible hordes of rotating dog bone shaped aliens and other oddly-formed ships. You couldn't tell me that this wasn't the best game ever. The only thing that made it better was when he'd finally hand over the Game Boy to me so I could spend some time defeating the bad guys and the (seemly) colossal bosses lead them. That was 20 years ago. After sitting down recently to see if I got the same rush as before, I came to realize that much of it just wasn't there anymore.

Okay, so here's the story. The year is 2159. Earth has been attacked by hostile forces from the planet Reticulon. Several hundred years ago, Reticulon sent messages conveying their intent to attack. The Earth Federation Government was formed so that Earth would be protected by the Federation Army. But guess what? The power of the aggressive Reticulon forces proved too much for the Federation Army. Earth was subjected to a most humiliating defeat. Oh noes!! But there is one last chance. The Federation Army has a secret megabase on the Moon. Here, the Earth's finest scientists and technicians stole borrowed the blueprints for that Galaga fighter ship that took out all those endless waves of alien bug creatures and developed an ultra-performance fighter ship. The name of this fighter is Solar Striker.

Much like a recently birthed calf, the shooter genre was standing on wobbly legs when it made its debut on the Game Boy. While certain early games could sometimes turn out to be instant classics (see: Tetris), others would only marginally provide the grander experiences we were having on the NES and Sega Genesis back then. Solar Striker is a prime example of the latter. Granted, it was great to finally have a shooter on the small screen that allowed fans of the genre to dodge bullets, blast aliens, and foil their sinister plans on the go. But at its core, the game was only a thin shadow of what made shooters so fun in the first place. You fly around in a generic space craft, fire generic weapons, fighting mostly generic enemies that fly in generically predicable patterns. With a little practice, you can easily dispose of most waves of enemies before they even make it on the screen in the early stages. Not bad if you're new to shooters and want to start off ultra simple. But this was mostly viewed as boring in the eyes of most players even back when the game first came out. I can't lie though-- as a kid, I thought this was game the biz for real.

Your weapons are a missile and several upgrades to increase your offensive capabilities. You can increase your weapon's power by destroying a special pod that leaves behind a power up icon. The missiles have 4 levels of power-- single shot (default), double shot, triple shot, and a more powerful version of the double shot. Upgrading the double shot only requires that you collect one power up icon. The other two upgrade levels require two power up icons each. Although it seems a little backwards that your ultimate weapon takes you back down to double shot style of shooting (instead of building on the triple shot), it's actually very effective at cutting through waves of alien ships much quicker than the other downgraded weapons. If your ship is destroyed while having an upgraded weapon, your next ship will have the previous level of weapon power. So if you had the triple shot, for instance, then getting killed would bring you down to the simpler double shot missile, and so on. It can be a bummer to have to grab an extra two power up capsules again, but it still beats being forced to start from scratch like you do in most other shooters.

The game itself isn't all that time consuming. It's only 6 stages in length and the first 3 are fairly easy. Instead of a long play session, the game's "twist" is that it suddenly tries to kick your butt once you reach the 4th stage and onward. As can be expected, there is a boss to fight after each stage. In the first 3 stages, the normal enemy ships attack in easy patterns to follow and the bosses have fairly simplistic attach patterns as well. Stage 4 attempts to kick things up a notch by having more aggressive enemy attack patterns and it becomes far easier to fall victim to a stray bullet. And I absolutely loathe the boss for that too. You have to fight this ground-based target called Xenocrypt. It constantly hurls a volley of bullets all over the place. It's tricky to destroy because you can only do damage to the center portion of the enemy and you're also forced to bop & weave in a tight space while trying to line yourself up with the center portion of the screen. Beyond level 4 are enemies that are increasingly harder to destroy-- especially the Blazer, which can only worth attacking if you have the most powerful weapon upgrade. The good news is that successfully destroying Blazers allows you to rapidly rack up enough points to get a 1Up (which has nice "1Up chime") much quicker than if you didn't bother with them at all. Oddly enough, the final boss in stage 6 is super easy and requires little concentration to blow to smithereens.

The visual quality in Solar Striker isn't that bad actually. It's not the best that the Game Boy has to offer, but it was an appreciable attempt for an early GB title. The game's stages follow a logical progression of scenery. You first start off in a star field in space. In the second stage, you’re making your way through the ozone of the enemy's home planet. The next stage has you flying above a city highway, complete with the dotted lines and everything. And the later stages progresses like so. So while it isn't as flashy as other shooters to come after it (and before for that matter), I did enjoy the intelligent progression of surroundings as I reach subsequent stages.

The game's audio aspects are very likable. It has the normal sound effects you would associate with a "shmup" (I never liked that acronym by the way). The music is the most outstanding of the game to me. It’s nice to listen to, albeit very repetitive. The repetitive soundtrack doesn't hurt the game much since the game itself is a short ride. In a way, it only seems right that the music doesn't drone on before repeating in this case. I would say that at least some of the musical selections are memorable since I could still recall the music to the first for many after playing the game. My favorite though, is the music for the 5th stage. It perfectly conveys the feeling that, yes, you have indeed traveled deep into enemy doo-doo and you had better watch your surroundings carefully.

In all, Solar Striker is great if you want to play a game that you can complete in under 20 minutes. Even with its steeper difficulty towards the latter half of the game, the initial run through is still relatively easy compared to game like the R-Type and Thunder Force series. You can unlock a harder difficulty level by beating and pressing the select button at the title screen, so it's definitely worth a look if you were hoping for a greater challenge. I don't think this game is very hard to find in recent years. You just might need to be a bit careful of the prices that some stores want to charge for a simple Game Boy game. From a collector's standpoint, it's worth owning since this is the only shooter the Nintendo directly developed and published themselves. Otherwise, if you’re looking to have full scale 2D shooter experience, you're interest are best served elsewhere.

If you enjoyed this review, be a pal and hit that “thumbs up” button, would ya?Danks!

Funny

Yeah, I just felt in the mode to go ahead and review the game. It's a very nostalgic GB game for me and wanted to share my thoughts on it with you guys. At the same time, I had to be real and recognize that I'm not amazed by it the way I used to be.

Solar Striker....

I remember Solar Striker. My best friend had it along with Castlevania Adventures. I got Super Mario Land with mine. Nintendo always knew how to make a great visual presentation no matter what the hardware. Other companies would make their games messy and blurry.

Man, the Game Boy seemed like the neatest toy in the universe when it came out. Four shades of off-green! But you could take your video gaming everywhere!

To this day, I love handheld gaming, especially now that all the big RPGs from the NES, SNES, PlayStation, and Saturn are being remade for them. I'm enjoying Lunar: SSH right now.

Sun Struck

Your write-up really took me back to the early days of the Game Boy. Since the game hasn't aged well, that's definitely when it was at its best. You'd have thought that Nintendo would have gotten portable shmups out of its system after that handful of stages in Super Mario Land.

Solar Striker's really not a bad game; it's more of a good idea that came out at a bad time. Given the game's difficulty, it should be fair to say that it's designed for younger players. Maybe a more accurate statement would be that it doesn't have very much depth. The other problem with the game is that the original Game Boy wasn't exactly well-suited for the kind of fast action that defined the shmup genre at the time. The system's low-resolution display with 4 colours and loads of motion blur would have forced the developers to make a slow game with simple graphics. Scrolling visuals on the original Game Boy has always been a problem.

The really strange thing about Solar Striker is that it doesn't feel like a game that was developed by Nintendo. There aren't any memorable characters. There isn't much musical variety. The visual style is fairly generic. The real story behind the game may have been that Nintendo just wanted to have a few more of their own games on store shelves. With how barebones Solar Striker ended up being, the ROM size must have been tiny and therefore cheap to manufacture. Back then, it's doubtful that Nintendo was any less likely to release the occasional low-budget game for a quick buck than they are now.

I remember this one...

A friend of mine in elementary school used to have this game, and a pretty good-sized collection of other GB titles. I remember this one seeming decent, but not great; by the time I came into the market for GB games, Wario Land was either out or very close to being released. I'd be interested to revisit this one at some point.

Hmmm..

I think I had this game. I can't really recall for sure, but the pictures seem to be jogging some sort of memory I can't can't quite place. I'm going to have to go through my old GameBoy games later... Great review though.

Just in the emulator

@ Dr.Graffin: Acutally, Solar Striker (like most other Game Boy games) isn't truely played in black & white...even on the original Game Boy. They at tend to have a black & green, or similar type of hue.

I use TGB Turbo, a Game Boy emulator to grab the screenshots for the GB games that I review. This emullator, like every other one that I've tried only displays in black & white, unless the ROM is a Game Boy Color or Advance game. I can't seem to get it to diplay the Game Boy's true colors, so we're stuck with black & white screenshots.

When I'm test playing game for review, I always play on my Game Boy Advance SP, which displays them in limited colors. Solar Striker looks very nice on it.

@ Mega_Krang: Wow, thanks buddy! I was hoping that someone would like that analogy. I'm trying to improve the way I describe certain aspects about a game or era of gaming.

@ San_Andreas_666: Like I said in my review, I thought Solar Striker was the shiz back in the day. I especially enjoyed the music. I'm always big games that have interesting soundtracks.

And yes, I'm also happy to see that the GBA/DS has become a breeding ground for RPGs and RPG remakes. I say bring it on!

@ Mr.Smashy: Hey man, you raise some valid points there. In fact, I was thinking the same thing regarding the fact that this doesn't initially come across as a game that would have been produced by Nintendo. I was kinda floored when I found out that this was there first and only attempt at a 2d scolling shooter.

But then again, perhaps Nintendo just feels that they can't create an experinece and characters that would be as memorable as Super Mario, Samus, and Link. All the more reason why I was interested in covering this game.

@ Elkovsky: You know, I never gave the Wario Land series a chance. I kinda wish that I did because Wario is such an iconic character in the Mario universe now. He's no longer just a footnote in a sea of other characters.

Thanks so much for reading my friend!

@ MaximumBannen: Yes Bannen-- unlock those repressed memories of being destroyed just as you were dealing that end level boss the final blow. Find the game, and fulfill your desssstiny!

@ Seandood: Don't worry, if the cops ask, I'll say that I don't know nothi'n about no blueprint thievery. I won't snitch.

I could get into it.

It sounds good and graphically it doesn't really matter to me on a lot of handheld games. I don't expect them to be amazing looking. This is game I could play to kill time with. Some games on the handhelds (or all games on them) need to have an anytime save system. I wouldnt argue this one needs one though if it can be beaten in 20 minutes. Just a thought.

Shooters

To this day the only shooter I've ever played was an arcade game called View Point. It was hard though. Really hard. That was one of the things that turned me off from them completely. I had a game boy back in the day, I still have it. It hasn't been on for years. I never heard of this game to be honest and I'd feel kind of hard pressed to play it now. Something about the genre just turns me off.

Smash TV is a shooter right? Well I liked that game a lot, but not the SNES version, oh no. I had a very neat handheld version that was so awesome I'd play it non-stop! Sometimes I'd prefer to play it over my SNES back then. That is without a doubt the best shooter I've played, though my list of shooters is quite short... I was so pissed off when I lent my cousin my handheld Smash tv and got it back in pieces :(

Blah

great review

this game looks to have aged pretty bad, but your review is highly informative and entertaining....I think your review did more justice than this game deserved, lol. Nintendo developing shumps aint exactly their forte I reckon :-)

I remember that game

I played the hell out of it as a kid. Level 4 was a beast, but that's to be expected at higher difficulties. I am not surprised to discover that it doesn't hold up too well today, but you are spot on when you mention that was a fine example of what a good early-era game boy game was. Fast action, good audio, and reasonable if abstract graphics.